We have travelled down the mountains and landed on India’s southwestern coast in the small town of Alleppey (or Alapuzha) and Alleppey is part of a large area called Kerala backwaters. Kerala backwaters are a collection of freshwater lakes, rivers and canals that form a 900-km network right next to the coast and it contains a rich flora and fauna. We rented bikes to explore the surroundings and ended up biking 22.5 km in the countryside. The ride contained a lot of saluting and waving to the local people and we even took the bikes to look at the famous houseboats that go up and down on the lakes in the Kerala backwaters. We have decided that we will not go with them, because we do not want to contribute even more to the pollution that these boats gladly dump in the water. We will however go kayaking in the small channels around Alleppey, but we await a good day to avoid rain and bad weather when we are out on the lake. The monsoon season has not quite released its grip on this area just yet. However, we have tried some morning yoga and we realised that we both need to practice much more on our flexibility. We have had private teachers who come to us in the morning and we have been taught both Hatha and Asthanga yoga. We prefer Asthanga yoga despite it being more towards the religious direction (when we should pray to a god we just skip it and think of other things). Asthanga felt more like a workout and Hatha yoga was more like calm stretch exercises in the morning. It looked very funny when we tried the different positions, Pontus has really stiff legs and Ulrika’s balance is extremely poor because of her worn ankles (too many times with sprained feet on the soccer and handball court).

This was a short post, but hopefully a lot of exciting things will happen in the future that we can tell you about. We look forward to kayaking and hopefully we will be able to meet some libertarians and/or bitcoin enthusiasts here in India! That would be a nice change from all the communist symbols we’ve seen here so far. We have seen to many hammer and sickle-symbols here and we really do not understand how people so openly show their support for Che Guevara who was a homophobe, rapist, pedophile and murderer (except because of ignorance of course, as is usually the case). Here is a link to a youtube videoworth watching about Che Guevara by Stefan Molyneux.

En av kanalerna i Alleppey! One of the canals in Alleppey!

Vallar getter på järnvägen! Herding the goats on the railroad!

Alleppey var en viktig hamn förr i tiden och Allepeybron underlättade transporten av gods från fartygen in till land! Alleppey was an important harbour in the past and Alleppey bridge facilitated the transport of goods from ships to land!